I agree that you shouldn't NEED a stylus to make some things work on a tablet but I NEED a stylus for my line of work.
I work for a biotech company where I interact with research scientists, clinicians, administrators, process engineers, and IT professionals. Since I have over 30 years of experience in research, engineering, and IT, I attend a lot of meetings where I need to take handwritten notes and draw lots of network infrastructure diagrams, org charts, rough graphs, equations, etc. I use a fine stylus in MS OneNote.
A virtual keyboard would not cut it for me. It is slower than handwriting for me. I use a lot of symbols when I take notes that the keyboard either does not have or has buried under several layers.
While a capacitive stylus is passable for casual notes and drawings, comparing it to a resistive (think Wacom) pen, is like using a fat felt-tip marker when you need a mechanical pencil. The biggest problem with a capacitive stylus is that you can not see precisely where you are writing. A resistive stylus has a thin tip on the end making it vastly more useful for drawing as well as selecting small icons, tabs, radio buttons, drop down arrows, and text. (especially with legacy programs)
It is much better than a capacitive stylus and vastly better than a finger.
The nice thing is the different input methods are not mutually exclusive.
I use my finger to swipe the screen and my stylus for finer motor movements.
I do the same on my Windows 8 convertible tablet, my 7" n-trig stylus supported android tablet, and my s Pen supported Galaxy Note II.